| nettime's_indigestive_system on Mon, 9 Oct 2006 07:26:43 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> gender and (how happy are) you etc digest [x6] |
"Melissa" <mbianco@________________.com>
how happy are you
John Hopkins <jhopkins@commspeed.net>
Re: <nettime> Gender and You
Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
re: etc.
Wayne Myers <waz@easynet.co.uk>
Re: <nettime> Gender and You
Kali Tal <kali@kalital.com>
Re: <nettime> Gender and Me
coco fusco <animas999@yahoo.com>
Re: <nettime> Gender and You
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From: "Melissa" <mbianco@________________.com>
Subject: how happy are you
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:49:10 +0200
perfectly divine in that boot, polly. get them for my party; you 'll =
dance likelong since have ended." black coats.
he said: jacklord knows what's best for us, and things go better when he =
manages than when
and exalt the little music teacher to the rank of a young lady.
as the piano was rolled forward, the leader's stand pushed back, and all =
eyesat her so keenly that she felt as transparent as a pane of glass, and =
coloured"yes,k. may have left milk street, now, and i don't know where he =
has gone."
always told them it was absurd for march to go into the army, always =
predictedwrote it.it came to arithmetic and geography, he had to go down =
a long way, and begin
him; so she had learned, that she might surprise dr. alec when she got =
home;
him; so she had learned, that she might surprise dr. alec when she got =
home;but when the lance came down on her back with a loud whack, both cow =
and donkeythat no one had a chance to peep.than it deserves. my children, =
beware of popularity; it is a delusion and a
"oh, my!" as soon as they looked over the wall. when they were all =
sitting inin a short time, and when the emperor returned his =
nickel-plated bodyand fro with unfailing regularity all through the early =
spring. laurie
that the mother should not take her baby to the pool but let thirst
our happiness by such a serious experiment. we don't agree and weproud of =
those two words, and don't we like to say them=3F" interruptedto feel as =
if a very strong will was slowly but steadily influencingthat would =
answer their purpose. they flew over a village so big that
'how'shad not forbidden it, mr. fletcher lounged about the piazzas, =
tantalizingas the professor spoke, his eyes rested proudly on
a small brown object which gave out a faint fragrance.
no teasing allowed." and tom took himself off with a theatrical =
farewell.to walk up stairs and address puttel with the peculiar remark, =
"youlight of the prank as she could without betraying meg or =
forgettingsmall por-tion of it just back of the woods," replied the =
machine.
then the private was given'givethe sawhorse, in a rough but not =
unpleasant voice. "a creature like
i'm too dark to wear it, but it would just suit you. you'll need a
That night, after the twins had washed the accumulated stock of =
dishes,the twins to faithfully chronicle the cause of their absence and =
their
is absent templateThe summer passed pleasantly for George Shaw and his =
cheery oldMarking the Italian Catholic Church's "Day for Life," Benedict =
stressed the need to protect all human life.
brave as they were in facing Spanish pirates, they were timid to the
Mrs. s eyes flashed ominously.which made him yell with pain and =
surprise.fannin her and tryin to keep her cheered up. Her face was a bad =
color
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Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 14:14:07 -0700
From: John Hopkins <jhopkins@commspeed.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Gender and You
Hi Coco, Kali:
>Thank you for your important statements and also for sticking to your
>guns on these questions, which have always been difficult for active
>nettimers ( who are largely white, male and straight) to respond
>to without knee jerk deployment of terms such as "essentialist"
>which are used as epithets. There is little consciousness in this
>context of how the refusal to deal intelligently with thoughtful
>feminist and postcolonial critiques contributes to generating an
>environmentin which fundamentalisms of all kinds of flourish. The
>actually repressive nature of the supposedly universalist neutrality
>of the internet, of new media art milieus, of European and American
>democratic cultures is what becomes evident when dialogues such as the
>one you propose are foreclosed by reticence and even silence of your
>interlocutors.
The repressive nature of these social systems is explicit in the
systems themselves, it is not necessary to see a failed dialogue to
come to an understanding on this. Although the process of coming to
dialogue is formed by the social system in which the participants are
embeded, failure of dialogue is both a universal and individual
issue. Dialogue requires open-ness to the (individual) Other, and
rhetoric which uses reductive global terminologies automatically
precludes an understanding of that idiosyncratic Other whose be-ing
may or may not have the stereotypical stamp of the term invoked.
Using reductive terms in the process is demeaning to the Other.
Kali saying that a perceived state-of-being "male baggage" can't be
left behind seems to be a statement of absolute conditions that can't
be transcended. How can it be that only that one state-of-being
cannot be relinquished? How is that state-of-being so unlike others
that make it immutable? Is there a class of immutable states?
"Female baggage?" What does this implicitly rigid viewpoint mean in
the long term?
It sounds like a built-in polarity in relation that will preclude any
possibility of forward movement.
It shuts the possibility of dialogue off before it has the
opportunity to begin.
Dialogue and the transformation that evolutionary human relation
offers is predicated on change and mutability. Otherwise, what's the
point?
Personally, I perceive a crack in the facade of the concept of
"critique" -- that parts of critique may be built on this
immutability of concept. I prefer the indeterminacy of dialogue...
Cheers,
jh
>Kali Tal <kali@kalital.com> wrote:
>
>> Alan and I simply disagree on identity politics. I don't think that
>> "male baggage" can be left behind ; I think that social/cultural/
>> "gender location is crucially important in any analysis; I think it's
>> "impossible to do good analysis at all if race/gender/class isn't part
> > "of the critique.
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Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 17:38:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
Subject: re: etc.
I think I should bow out. Because I used the word essentialist, I'm now
part of a greater problem, being white (apparently Jews are white without
question) and neocolonialist. I might as well admit it; I'm racist,
sexist, xenophobic, and I really am the locus of the problem. It's true -
I hate Jews, Black, Catholics, WASPS, think of Japanese as Orientals, want
to rape every man and woman I see, cruise the net for children (since I'm
sure that's next - Jennifer was young) - in fact I support George Bush
totally as well as the neoconservative agenda and hope that Israel blows
the mid-east to hell. I should add that my work reflects all of this -
that, in fact, I identity completely with Nikuko the cute little bargirl
from Nakasu(forget the name), and that my leftist leanings are really a
masquerade. So I agree with Coco here, Kali - bravo for pointing all of
this out. I should mention I also kick beggars, belong to the KKK, and
in fact hate women; my male gaze slices through every body I see. Gay
rights make no sense to me; this is an oxymoron. And in my spare time, in
fact, I do wear blackface. So understand, I'm the real enemy here, the one
who abuses children, rapes, burns crosses, beats up Jews and Blacks, the
one who's created an increased homeless population in our neighborhood (of
course I report them to the police), the one who wants to steal your
identity and privacy - and of course the one who uses all of this as an
excuse for _really_ being the one who, in fact, believes and does all of
this.
So I should apologize for my attitudes in the past; the Internet Text - if
you've even read it - it's at http://www.asondheim.org - is probably one
of the vilest things you'll come across. Hatred drips from every page.
Now I'll go back to crawling under the differend (another white male
neoconservative excuse of course)
- Alan
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Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 22:52:36 +0100
From: Wayne Myers <waz@easynet.co.uk>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Gender and You
On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 13:21:02 -0400 (EDT)
Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure how much longer nettime will let me go on, but I feel
> again I have to respond; now I'm an Orientalist as well as sexist.
> This is one of the ugliest exchanges I've had - maybe the ugliest -
> but I can't let it go.
Alan, I really don't think you need to go on any further. I think that
the respective positions have been set out very clearly in the
discussion you have had with, uh, 'Kali', so far. Those who have eyes to
see will see. Those who already know what they think will not be capable
of altering their positions. A text created by starting from its
conclusion then mapping that onto whatever happens to be to hand is
pretty clear. You can tell it by the weakness of its argument, if indeed
there is anything approaching 'argument' here.
One of you comes to explore and to create. One of you comes to destroy
and to restrict others. It's pretty clear which one is which. Some
people on the list will side with one, some with the other. It has
always been this way.
(Personally, while I think it's an ongoing challenge for any of us to
inhabit the Nettime space, I myself only really read it these days for
the high-faluting name-calling. It's like being in the playground only
with longer words. Makes me feel young again.)
I hardly need to remind anyone calling someone names is what you do when
you want to attack them but don't actually have anything to attack them
with. The longer the names you use and the more high-falutin' the
language you dress it all up in, the more ridiculous you make yourself
look. Kali is looking pretty ridiculous to me right now.
Is she a real person or someone masquerading as a bone-brittle PC
shrill? Because taking her words as satire on the tragic insularity and
ultimate ideological self-destructiveness of the overly PC would give
them some worth and meaning. To think that this was actually a real
person saying and thinking these things is just depressing.
After all, sexism and racism are real problems. People who see those
problems where they are not in fact manifest are part of that problem,
because they obscure the real problem. That's why Kali's utterly
wrong-headed and unjustified attack on Alan is so deeply annoying.
Because Kali, not Alan, is the one who is perpetuating racism and sexism
here. Because her words devalue the terms, apply it where it is not
applicable, and strengthen the cause of those who actually wish to
perpetuate it.
That may not be her intent, but it is her result.
Laugh or cry? Your call.
Cheers,
Wayne
--
Wayne Myers
http://www.waz.easynet.co.uk/
http://www.conniptions.org/
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From: Kali Tal <kali@kalital.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Gender and Me
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 16:20:28 -0700
Dear Coco,
It's wonderful to read you here. Thanks for responding.
Women talking talking to women and feminists talking to feminists:
there is nothing essential about our position. Declaring one is
"speaking as a woman" is a comment on the constructed nature of our
identity. Feminist, antiracist and post-colonial scholars have long
discussed the manner in which the Other is forced to learn the
language of the master, use the tools of the master, and know the
desires of the master. Our very survival often depends on it. But the
imperative to know the master is not reciprocal -- the master does
not want or need to know us, and in fact wants our "us" to reflect
only his own needs, desires and perceptions. This is elementary, and
yet it seems to be beyond the ability of most white heterosexual men
to grasp. We find ourselves, again and again, bogged down in the
explanation, weary already because we have to "prove" our oppression
over and over, while the conditions that oppress us are rarely
addressed. It's a way to sap our energy and divert our efforts. But I
do not have to prove oppression to you, even though you and I may
have different opinions about many things. Thus, my decision to
speak to you directly here, and not to engage in the cycle of
repetition is liberatory.
When I say I am "speaking as a woman," it means that I consciously
occupy the cultural location that is called "woman" in the society in
which I live, and that I am voicing my views from that perspective --
a perspective that is largely absent from virtual environments like
nettime. It is easy for writers and readers to "forget" I am a
woman unless I deliberately occupy that space. When I write, I leave
my body at home, and so it does not "distract" unless I insert that
body into the text; neither does my femaleness detract from the
points I am making, as it so often does in face-to-face
conversation. But, as Art McGee and others have been saying for
years and years, there is no freedom in being assumed to be or
mistaken for white or male. It is not -- as some would have it -- a
compliment. Rather, it underlines how unwelcome I truly am in male
discourse: as long as I am apparently male (i.e., not speaking as a
woman or a feminist) I am accepted and even lauded. But if I bring
my body (or the social location that is determined by the body I
wear) into the conversation, all of a sudden, I am causing trouble.
Mary Helen Washington called these unwanted intrusions an "eruption
of funk." It makes most of the people who wear a male body very
uncomfortable when a woman intrudes her sexed self into intellectual
conversation, since most men are used to pretending that their selves
and many of the conditions of their lives aren't determined by their
bodies: men are naturally "human," but women can only be human if
they leave their "woman-ness" behind.
One of the things I find most exhausting in these eruptions is the
overpoweringly hostile nature of the response to feminist or
antiracist critique. The strategy of male resistance to feminist
critique includes crying victim, attempting to attack the credibility
or the character of the "accuser," dismissively labeling the person
who raises the issue of sexism or racism ("essentialist PC-enforcer"
or "angry manhating dyke" or "damaged woman" ), claiming the
authority to define (you're an essentialist because this is how I
define "essentialist" and that's what you are), using the claim that
"some of my best friends are women/black/whatever" to undermine the
authority of the Other who makes the challenge, and taking on the
critique in internet (white male) flamewar mode complete with point-
by-point quotes and rebuttals. The process is, by now, profoundly
uninteresting, especially since it almost never engages with the key
questions. While feminist, antiracist and postcolonialist critics are
all too familiar with the pattern, it seems largely invisible to the
white men who unselfconsciously replicate it.
The strength of the reaction seems to me only to underline the fact
that most men (and I deliberately say most men, since sexism is the
rule rather than the exception) are deeply afraid of confronting the
uncomfortable truth that many of the "rights" they take for granted
(including impersonating women and nonwhite people or writing the
imagined persona of the Other without considering the consequences to
Others) are not "human rights" but white heterosexual male privileges
-- that they, in a phrase oft-repeated by gender and race activists
-- live suspended within an invisible web of privilege. Thus, a
simple and straightforward argument that a man is being sexist
results in what -- in a woman -- many men would call hysteria.
Certainly it results in hyperbole ("the ugliest exchange I've ever
had"). Truly, if being called a sexist -- or even being publicly
misread -- were the ugliest exchanges I'd ever had (or that any
woman, queer, or nonwhite person I know has ever had), I would count
myself blessed.
When I say a man (of any race) is producing sexist work, or when I
say a white scholar (male or female) is producing racist work, I
almost always become, in the eyes of the person being critiqued, far
greater than I am: I am no longer simply Kali, a woman with no real
power (academic or otherwise) except the force of my argument. No...
I become The Problem, representing all women who have ever -- or whom
he fears will ever -- charge him with behaving in ways that support
the oppression of women or nonwhite people. It does not matter that I
carefully critique only the work a man produces, that I have no claim
to accessing his intentions or experiences, that I write calmly and
reasonably, and that I don't call names. It doesn't matter how
strictly I stick to "I" statements when I am speaking of my
perceptions ("I see," "I believe," "I think," "it seems to me").
I'd like to offer a counter-example to emphasize how extreme those
hostile reactions are. I am a white woman (from the upper-, not
middle-class, but fallen on genteel poverty in my retirement) who has
been an engaged African American studies scholar and antiracist
activist for almost a quarter century. During the course of my career
(s), I have occasionally been told by African American friends,
students or colleagues that one behavior or another was racist.
Sometimes I felt that the person making the comment was right;
sometimes I felt they were wrong. In all cases I did my best to
understand the charge and to address it, even when I thought that the
assessment was out of the ballpark. There were times I was sure I was
right, only to find later I had been mistaken. I felt defensive, but
I was also self-conscious of my position as a white (and therefore
privileged) person, and I knew most of my feelings of defensiveness
came from wanting to do the right thing, and being embarrassed about
possibly having screwed up or even being perceived as having screwed
up... because screwing up would have meant I'd behaved in a way I
felt was reprehensible. Nobody feels good about that. But feeling
good wasn't nearly as important as doing the right thing, and if I
undertook the work I thought was important, I was sometimes going to
be deeply uncomfortable or even wounded. I learned that it was vital
not to take such charges personally, even if they felt personal. When
black people said I'd behaved in a racist fashion, whether they were
right or wrong they weren't out to get me; they wanted me to change
my practices so I wouldn't contribute to oppressing *them*.
I realized quickly that I wasn't didn't act like the majority of
white people; I was a "race traitor" and truthfully I've taken far
more abuse from whites than black people about it. Men who can take
critiques of sexism calmly and respond to them in measured fashion
without engaging in the behaviors described in the first paragraph of
this post are also a small minority. It is far easier and more
common, though, for members of the privileged class to cry "reverse
racism," or "reverse sexism" and to attempt to distract the audience
from the real power relationship that exists.
In sisterhood,
Kali
___________________________
On Oct 8, 2006, at 10:32 AM, coco fusco wrote:
Dear Kali
Thank you for your important statements and also for sticking to your
guns on these questions, which have always been difficult for active
nettimers ( who are largely white, male and straight) to respond to
without knee jerk deployment of terms such as "essentialist" which
are used as epithets. There is little consciousness in this context
of how the refusal to deal intelligently with thoughtful feminist and
postcolonial critiques contributes to generating an environmentin
which fundamentalisms of all kinds of flourish. The actually
repressive nature of the supposedly universalist neutrality of the
internet, of new media art milieus, of European and American
democratic cultures is what becomes evident when dialogues such as
the one you propose are foreclosed by reticence and even silence of
your interlocutors.
Coco Fusco
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Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 18:29:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: coco fusco <animas999@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Gender and You
Despite the rather impolitic way that the question has been phrased, I will
just say for the record that all the terms listed below are part of the English
language and are standard within cultural studies in general and postcolonial
studies in particular. Even television hosts such as Jon Stewart or Bill Mahrer
use these words. Given that this list-serve is usually rife with all kinds of
specialized language, not to mention esoteric allusions to computer code, I
find this question to be just another attempt to silence those who raise the
issues connected with the terminology. This accusation of not speaking English
sounds just like Berlusconi's rant about "our civlization" and "ther
barbarism." So now feminists and postcolonialists are the barbarians who don't
speak English. Howe very telling.
It is really quite appalling to read defensive reactions to feminist criticism
from men who usually dominate this list. Whenever the issue of race or gender
comes up, the men assume the posture of wounded children, and either snarl (ie
what the hell is this word and why don't you speak English?) or take everything
as a personal attack (I am not an Orientalist, I am not a sexist, I am not I am
not I am not).
Have you guys out there all forgotten that discourses can be sexist, racist,
Orientalist, Eurocentric etc without the person speaking being a
personification of sexism, racism, Eurocentrism or Orientalism?
Coco
Andres Manniste <amanniste@rsight.net> wrote: What the hell is
essentialist
postcolonial
feminist
male baggage
race/gender/class (Derrida in triads?)
Orientalist
constructivist (eeuh!)
PC-as-
an-oppressive-force???
and whatever happened to speaking english?
Andres
coco fusco wrote:
> Dear Kali
>
> Thank you for your important statements and also for sticking to your
> guns on these questions, which have always been difficult for active
<...>
---------------------------------
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